When the next week came, and I went to school on Monday as I was supposed to, a ludicrous rumor about me was running rampant throughout the class.
My classmates had somehow gotten it their heads that I was stalking the girl. I found out from the boy who was now in the habit of offering me gum. When I scowled at the sheer stupidity of the idea, he seemed amused and, yes, offered me gum. I politely declined.
I tried imagining the sequence of events that had led to the rumor. Almost certainly, several classmates had seen us together on different occasions, and they’d concluded I was always hanging around where she was. My peers, who generally considered me unpleasant, decided I was a malicious stalker. That was the best my imagination could do, but I thought I was close to what had happened.
However the rumor had started, it was ridiculous and entirely ungrounded in reality. And they all believed it. Disgusting. Almost everyone in class was looking at me and whispering about how I was a stalker and they needed to watch out.
I’ll say it again: They disgusted me completely. Why did they believe their mob mentality was right by default? I’d bet that if thirty of them got together, they could murder someone and not even care. People who believed they were on the right side were capable of any deed. They didn’t even realize they were acting like cogs in a machine and not individual people with humanity.
I wondered if they would escalate to bullying me, but that was me being overly self-conscious. Ultimately, our classmates’ attentions were on her. Me hanging off her didn’t change that. And I wasn’t hanging off her, anyway.
They had no need to bother themselves with taking any action against me, and they had nothing to gain from doing so either. The only one who had any real interest in me was the best friend, who glared at me every day as she came into class. Being marked as her enemy was scary.
On Tuesday, I paid my second visit to the girl in the hospital, and when I reported the rumors to her, she clutched her hands to her pancreas and burst into laughter.
She said, “Oh, [Boy I’m Getting along With]-kun, you’re all so hilarious.”
“You think spreading malicious rumors behind peoples’ backs is amusing? I didn’t know you were so cruel.”
“What’s amusing is that nobody has any idea what to do with you. Do you even know why you’re in that mess right now?”
I offered, “Because I’m spending time with you?”
“Trying to blame me, eh?” she said. She was sitting on her bed peeling a mandarin orange. “Wrong. They distrust you because you don’t talk to them. They don’t know what kind of person you are, [Boy I’m Getting along With]-kun. That’s why they make those assumptions about you. If you want to put a stop to this, I think you’re just going to have to make friends with them.”
Neither I nor my classmates needed that. Once she was gone, I’d be alone again, and they would forget about me.
She said, “I think if they got to know who you were, they’d understand how fun you are. Besides, I don’t believe they really think you’re a bad person.”
As I peeled my orange, I thought, That’s a dumb thing to say.
I said, “Except for you and Kyōko-san, they all think of me as [Unremarkable Classmate]—at best.”
She tilted her head, as if to drive home her point into the core of who I was. “Have you ever asked them?”
“I haven’t. But I still think they do.”
“You can’t know if you don’t ever ask. Until then, it’s only in your head. You might not be right.”
“I don’t care if I’m right or not. I don’t have anything to do with them, and it’s my head, anyway. It’s just what I think. I like to speculate what people think of me when they say my name.”
“How self-absorbed is that? Is that what you are—one of those self-absorbed guys?”
“No, I’m the self-absorbed prince, and I hail from the land of the self-absorbed. You ought to show me respect.”
Giving me a disinterested look, she hungrily ate her mandarin. I didn’t expect she would understand my point of view; she was my opposite, after all.
Human interaction was her life; her expressions and her nature told me as much. In contrast, aside from my family, all my interactions with other people began and ended in my head. I imagined if they liked or disliked me, but I didn’t particularly care which was true, as long as it didn’t lead me into harm. I had given up on social interactions from day one. I was her complete opposite; nobody needed me around. Although if someone were to ask me if I was fine with that, I might have had trouble answering.
Having finished her mandarin, she neatly folded the peel into a ball and tossed it into the waste bin. The peel made it in, and she clenched her hand into a triumphant fist.
She said, “So then, what do you think I think of you?”
“A boy you’re getting along with, I guess. Am I wrong?”
That was my honest answer, but she pursed her lips and said, “Wrong.” Then, more to herself, she added, “Although that used to be what I thought of you.”
I tilted my head quizzically. That was interesting phrasing. Did that mean instead of changing how she thought of me, she’d realized her feelings toward me were of a different nature than she’d first thought? My curiosity was piqued, if only by a little.
“All right,” I said. “Then how do you think of me?”
“If I told you, there’d be no fun in it. Friendship and romances are fun because you don’t know what you are to the other person.”
“So I was right—you do think that way.”
“Huh? Did we talk about this before?”